


Heat and Light

by maypop



Category: Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-29
Updated: 2012-09-29
Packaged: 2017-11-15 07:24:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/524683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maypop/pseuds/maypop
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the eighth life of Queen Ravenna, she lives in a very hot place... A drabble about the Queen's past.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heat and Light

In the eighth life of Queen Ravenna she lives in a very hot place. By the eighth life _Queenravenna_ has become her name, all of a piece, but she’s still young enough to feel slightly uncomfortable in her magic. This land will change that, dropping warm water down the back of her neck and smothering her with nasty wet heat until she gives up. The spell she picks twists air and shadow around her like cool dry scarves. If she moves fast enough, she can flick water off the tips of her fingers. 

She lets the king live for three whole weeks until she calls the air out of his lungs and adds it to her coat. His death sits around her shoulders like the pet she had to leave behind in #7. One of those chittery soft little weasels for some reason thought appropriate to a lady, likely for how easy it is for her husband to fling across the room, how much easier than a hound, which might be driven to loyalty.

With the king gone she finds things to like here. Whenever the rains stop, thumb sized lilies race to bloom everywhere there isn’t rice. Her brother’s nose turns bright pink. The Western ambassador can be induced to piss himself if she gathers the humidity from the ceiling and turns it into icicles when he suggests it’s time to redraw the map of fishing rights between their two countries. Queen Ravenna laughs and laughs and laughs.

The next morning, there are soft paper crinkles next to her eyes. She screams when she notices them, a scream that twists into her cloak of air and shadows until it gains weight, edges, and then it whips out of the circle, half-melted black volcano glass, and slams into her maid’s temple. 

The maid’s death would be instant, but for Queen Ravenna’s hot weather coat, which has been taught to hold a death in its folds. The girl’s spirit leaks out one eye and climbs Queen Ravenna’s leg, hip, stomach, shoulder. It still pulses with all the fear and hope of a farmgirl elevated to serve the Queen, and Queen Ravenna breathes it in desperately, only distantly aware of what she does. She exists half in the magic now, and thinks about it barely more than she has to think to catch a ball.

The girl’s death bloats her stomach like cramps, but it sucks the folds out of her skin, too. 

She makes it to life ten before she has to do it again, and after that, there is no stopping.

(“You’ll need more and more,” an old woman tells her, in ten’s slippery lisping hateful language. “If you do this now, you will kill and kill and kill until you meet a heart that chokes you—” After that, Queen Ravenna makes it a point to purge magic users from her realms.)


End file.
